{"slug": "tenmin-study-cards-for-a-friend-who-can-t-sit-through-100-slides", "title": "TenMin: study cards for a friend who can't sit through 100 slides", "summary": "A developer built TenMin, a local study tool that converts long lecture slide decks into short, scrollable study cards using the open-weight gemma3:4b model run through Ollama, with no account, API key, or internet required after setup. The app also includes a daily LeetCode streak guard with hints, and after a friend testing it complained about processing wait times, the developer changed it so cards stream in as each part of the deck finishes. The friend reported the cards sometimes miss important points and that a 4B laptop model has accuracy limits, so she still consults the original slides.", "body_md": "*This is a submission for the [Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend](https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-weekend-2026-10-01)*\n\nMy friend loses focus about every ten minutes when she studies. In exam season that's a real problem: her DBMS and DSA courses come as 100-slide decks, and just opening one feels exhausting. She also tends to drop her daily DSA practice during exams and regret it later.\n\nSo I built **TenMin**. You upload a slide deck as a PDF, and a local AI model turns it into short study cards: one concept, a few bullets, and one recall question. Because she scrolls when she gets distracted, I made the studying itself a scrollable feed. Cards come in sprints of five, with a short break screen after each one.\n\nThere's also a small **streak guard**: a daily LeetCode problem (DSA or SQL), a tick for \"I solved one today\", and a hint button that nudges her toward the approach without writing the code.\n\nEverything runs on my laptop. No account, no API key, and her course material is never uploaded anywhere.\n\n*Sprint 2 of 3, card 6 of 13. Each card shows the slides it came from, with a recall question to answer before revealing. The streak box at the top has the daily problem, a hint button, and the streak counter.*\n\n**Study in 10-minute sprints, with a local AI that never sends your slides anywhere.**\n\nTenMin turns long lecture slide decks into short, scrollable study cards, and helps keep a daily coding-practice streak alive during exam season. It was built for one real person: a friend who loses focus about every 10 minutes while studying, dreads 100-slide decks, and struggles to keep up her DSA practice during exams.\n\nEverything runs on your own laptop using an open-weight model through [Ollama](https://ollama.com). No account, no API key, no internet needed after setup.\n\n`gemma3:4b`, an open-weight model, run locally through Ollama.` unpdf` reads the PDF page by page, so every card can point back to its source slides. The model returns the cards as strict JSON, and the server cleans and validates each one.\nWhat I learned along the way:\n\n`num_ctx` explicitly, or long batches would be silently cut off.\nI handed it to her to try on her real study material. In her own words:\n\nHonestly, I actually liked using TenMin, especially during exams when looking at a 100-slide PPT itself feels exhausting 😭. The idea of breaking everything into small cards makes studying feel a little less overwhelming, and I like that I can just go through a few cards at a time instead of forcing myself to sit and read everything at once.\n\nThe recall questions are a nice touch too, because sometimes I feel like I've understood something while reading, but I can't actually remember it when I try to answer on my own. The source slide numbers are also helpful when I want to go back and check something.\n\nI also liked the daily coding streak idea because I tend to completely ignore DSA during exams and then regret it later 💀. The hints are useful when I'm stuck, especially when they give me an idea of how to approach a problem instead of just giving away the answer.\n\nBut yeah, it's not perfect. Sometimes the AI-generated cards miss a few important points or don't explain things properly, so I still have to refer to the original PPT. And processing takes quite a while, especially for bigger PDFs, which can get a little annoying when I'm already short on time.\n\nOverall, I genuinely think it's a useful idea, especially for someone like me who gets overwhelmed by huge portions during exams. It's not like it magically makes studying easy, but it makes getting started a lot less stressful.\n\nHer biggest complaint was the wait, so I changed the app because of it: cards now stream in as each part of the deck is finished, and she can start the first sprint while the rest is still being read.\n\nThe other complaint I haven't solved: sometimes the cards miss important points, so she still checks the original slides. A 4B model on a laptop isn't a careful human summarizer. I kept that honest in the app with source pages on every card and a warning next to AI hints.\n\nI could have built this on a closed API, but it would have been a worse tool for her.\n\nThe trade-off is real: a small local model is slower and less accurate than a large hosted one. For a tool she needs to trust with her notes and run at 1 AM, I thought the trade was worth it, and her feedback suggests she agrees.\n\nBy Antigravity as IDE\n\n**Best Use of Gemma:** TenMin runs Gemma 3 (4B), Google's open-weight model, locally through Ollama. It generates the study cards from a student's lecture slides and the three-level hints for the daily coding problem. I tuned the batch size, context window, and prompts around Gemma's limits on a laptop, and the whole thing works offline, so a student's course material never leaves her machine.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tenmin-study-cards-for-a-friend-who-can-t-sit-through-100-slides", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/shreyach52/tenmin-study-cards-for-a-friend-who-cant-sit-through-100-slides-4b57", "published_at": "2026-10-04 05:31:57+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-04 05:37:36.501360+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "generative-ai", "large-language-models", "ai-products"], "entities": ["TenMin", "Ollama", "gemma3:4b", "LeetCode", "unpdf", "Hacktoberfest"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tenmin-study-cards-for-a-friend-who-can-t-sit-through-100-slides", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tenmin-study-cards-for-a-friend-who-can-t-sit-through-100-slides.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tenmin-study-cards-for-a-friend-who-can-t-sit-through-100-slides.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tenmin-study-cards-for-a-friend-who-can-t-sit-through-100-slides.jsonld"}}